Failure To Furnish Details

Requests for Information are sent by the police following suspected road traffic offences when the driver was not identified at the time of the allegation. These are commonly sent in conjunction with a Notice of Intended Prosecution but are also sent as standalone requirements and can be sent to suspected drivers of vehicles, registered keepers of vehicles or even any person deemed to have information within his/her power to provide.

The recipient of a Request for Information has a duty to respond providing the requested information (i.e. the driver’s details) or any information within his/her power under Section 172 of the Road Traffic Act 1988 within the required time frame, usually 28 days of receipt.

Completion of the s172 request simply means that you are admitting to being the driver of a vehicle and does not mean that you are admitting to committing the allegation to which it relates. However prompt and thorough advice on any Request for Information is extremely important from the outset as there may be issues that would affect the way in which the document is responded to.

If someone is convicted of failing to comply with a valid request it would likely result in an endorsement of 6 penalty points onto their licence, or in some situations could lead to a disqualification being imposed by the court. As such the penalty for failing to respond can often be more severe than that for the original allegation.

As penalty points would be valid for a 3 year period they could have a severe impact on an individual’s driving licence, causing them to fall foul of the Totting Up Provisions and potentially resulting in a disqualification from driving of at least 6 months.

If someone is charged with an offence of failing to provide information there are often defences available to the allegation and the circumstances need to be considered in each case for example in situations when someone either claims to have provided the information, genuinely was unable to identify the driver or has not received the requests from the police.